A Phenomenological Study of Pastoral Accountability in Covenant Community

Most pastors and clergy minister from a place of a perceived divine calling and persist through the myriad of challenges of ministry, regardless of the personal toll that it takes on them. This tireless working can drive them to a place of poor emotional and mental health, which can ultimately affect themselves and their families in a negative way. The need for an effective peer support structure is imperative, and understanding the needs of local pastors can help build that support. Many ministers feel isolated in their efforts and could benefit greatly from a peer group where they could safely be themselves. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine and explore the experiences of ministers involved in a covenant accountability group and how they benefit mentally, socially, and spiritually. Interviewing pastors who had shared experiences in dealing with the various challenges of ministry while being consistently involved in covenant accountability relationships offered valuable information in overcoming the complex challenges of pastoral ministry. Ten interviews were conducted with pastors involved in a covenant accountability group, and the collected data were analyzed using qualitative methods. Three distinct categories arose from themes that came from the collected data regarding the experience of pastors involved in a covenant accountability group: atmosphere, relationships, and personal growth. Additional research is suggested in three different areas in assisting to build a viable pastors network: spousal input, geographical research, and long-term research

Megachurch success in the age of radical modernity : an analysis of the role of co-sanctified lexicons in three American cities

There has been a sharp decline in Christian church attendance in the past two decades, while at the same time megachurches are growing and thriving. This thesis examines the significant success of three megachurches in the United States: Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, California, and Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Joining the more recent qualitative research of megachurches (survey, case study, and focus-group interviews), the thesis adopts an in-depth qualitative and processual approach to the examination of the success of these three megachurches. The strengths of this approach are contrasted with the quantitative and abstracted approaches of much of the earlier dominant research within the existing literature on megachurches. The qualitative analysis is informed and guided by five general themes that have emerged from the existing academic literature on megachurches: individualism, consumerism, therapeutic comfort, anti-establishment, and cultural relevance. At the empirical heart of the study, the methodological tools of discourse analysis and website analysis are employed to conduct a thorough linguistic analysis of each of the three church websites. The website data upon which the analysis is based was accessed during the years of September 2013 – January 2014 (Lakewood Church), July 2015 (West Angeles Church of God in Christ), and February – April 2016 (Mars Hill Bible Church). The data includes all page links on the main page, and every link within each of the subsequent pages. Essentially, every link was captured and analyzed. This resulted in hundreds of pages for each megachurch. The resulting linguistic ethnography shows that though their social locations, ideologies, and theologies were significantly different from each other, each megachurch’s sacred lexicon was permeated by selected aspects of vernacular lexicons to the degree that the vernacular elements had also become part of the sacred. This resulted in co-sanctified lexicons that appeared to function to establish a habitus of safety and security for the megachurch attendees, despite the uneasy liminalities of radical modernity. The combination of theoretical perspective and empirical evidence provides strong grounds for suggesting that the co-sanctified lexicons enabled each megachurch to uniquely thrive, even while their surrounding culture was abandoning formal religious beliefs and practices

The World We Want to Live In

Digitalisation, digital networks, and artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing our lives! We must understand the various developments and assess how they interact and how they affect our regular, analogue lives. What are the consequences of such changes for me personally and for our society? Digital networks and artificial intelligence are seminal innovations that are going to permeate all areas of society and trigger a comprehensive, disruptive structural change that will evoke numerous new advances in research and development in the coming years. Even though there are numerous books on this subject matter, most of them cover only specific aspects of the profound and multifaceted effects of the digital transformation. An overarching assessment is missing. In 2016, the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) has founded a study group to assess the technological impacts of digitalisation holistically. Now we present this compendium to you. We address the interrelations and feedbacks of digital innovation on policy, law, economics, science, and society from various scientific perspectives. Please consider this book as an invitation to contemplate with other people and with us, what kind of world we want to live in

Networks, [Mis]trust, and Pentecostal Conversion: narratives of divergent pathways among small Black entrepreneurs in Tshwane

This thesis is an exploration of the cultural meanings, practices, and discourse that impinge upon the workings of social capital and trust among small black entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs need to draw on social networks to get advice and resources to launch and manage a business. The contacts that lead to successful outcomes are their social capital and they are a key component of entrepreneurial networks. Structural economic sociologists tend to emphasise 'structural holes', whereby a social actor who is in a position to bridge two actors with no direct ties to each other can parlay control over information into strategic advantage. Recent sociological literature highlights questions of meaning in networks and brings to the fore concerns with the larger cultural framework within which social networks are embedded. Relational economic sociologists contend that networks can be understood as composed of culturally constituted processes. Studies on the networks of South African entrepreneurs are few and far between, and they seem to suggest that African entrepreneurs don't mobilise social capital as well as their Indian and white counterparts. The research used qualitative approaches, relying on a combination of in-depth open-ended unstructured interviews and prolonged ethnographic immersion which generated rich understandings of entrepreneurs' lived experiences, subjective meanings, and contexts. The findings underscore the cultural contingency of social ties and network structure, suggesting that an entrepreneur's proneness to join particular types of associations and networks, and their ability to generate particular types of social ties and generalised trust has something to do with a range of cultural contingencies. The research devoted special attention to the cultural contingency of religion, bringing to light the entrepreneurial consequences of Pentecostal conversion. These intersect with, and extend far beyond, the networks of small black entrepreneurs, affecting issues at the very heart of entrepreneurship such as risk taking and proactiveness. I borrow the concept of 'cultural holes' to illustrate the contingencies of meaning that shape the networks and the entrepreneurial orientation of small black entrepreneurs and, ultimately, drive their divergent entrepreneurial trajectories. Finally, the study adumbrates a typology of small black entrepreneurs, arguing for the possibility that multiple cultural contingencies may open up alternate understandings of entrepreneurship

Deliberative Democracy in the EU. Countering Populism with Participation and Debate. CEPS Paperback

Elections are the preferred way to freely transfer power from one term to the next and from one political party or coalition to another. They are an essential element of democracy. But if the process of power transfer is corrupted, democracy risks collapse. Reliance on voters, civil society organisations and neutral observers to fully exercise their freedoms as laid down in international human rights conventions is an integral part of holding democratic elections. Without free, fair and regular elections, liberal democracy is inconceivable. Elections are no guarantee that democracy will take root and hold, however. If the history of political participation in Europe over the past 800 years is anything to go by, successful attempts at gaining voice have been patchy, while leaders’ attempts to silence these voices and consolidate their own power have been almost constant (Blockmans, 2020). Recent developments in certain EU member states have again shown us that democratically elected leaders will try and use majoritarian rule to curb freedoms, overstep the constitutional limits of their powers, protect the interests of their cronies and recycle themselves through seemingly free and fair elections. In their recent book How Democracies Die, two Harvard professors of politics write: “Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018)

Understanding the Practice of Girl Marriage in Northern Nigeria from the Perspectives of Key Decision-Makers

Research on the practice of girl marriage has been extensive with studies recommending local strategies that are peculiar to the countries involved. According to this extensive body of research the continued practice of girl marriage is concerning given the harms associated with it at community or societal level, especially for girls and women. While the perspectives of the people involved in girl marriage decisions are however relevant for these local strategies, very few studies have focused on these decision makers (parents and community leaders) within a cultural context. This gap in the research is addressed in the current study, which presents the perspectives of 25 community leaders and parents (21 men and four women) who are involved in girl marriage decisions, and five policy stakeholders whose roles include the enforcement of Nigeria’s 2003 Child Rights’ Act. In-depth interviews and observations were used to collect data in answer to the research question - how do the key decision makers explain the practice of girl marriage? Denzin’s (1989; 2001) construction of Interpretive Interactionism was employed as a framework for analysing and understanding the socio-cultural contexts within the study. While the findings of the present study suggest that strong cultural explanations underpin the continuity of girl marriage practices in Northern Nigeria, it also argues that this practice is strengthened by patriarchal power structures and the male exercise of control over the lives of women. This study suggests that the tendency to generalise about the practice of girl marriage in developing countries misses the relevance of individual country’s differences in historical backgrounds, political, legal, socio-economic and cultural context – all of which interact in complex ways to influence the age at first marriage in different countries. These findings have implications for the Nigerian constitution and policy stakeholders in terms of the need to institutionalise an approach which will address the issue of girl marriage in Northern Nigeria with the consciousness of the people involved in these marriage decisions

Ubiquitous Integration and Temporal Synchronisation (UbilTS) framework : a solution for building complex multimodal data capture and interactive systems

Contemporary Data Capture and Interactive Systems (DCIS) systems are tied in with various technical complexities such as multimodal data types, diverse hardware and software components, time synchronisation issues and distributed deployment configurations. Building these systems is inherently difficult and requires addressing of these complexities before the intended and purposeful functionalities can be attained. The technical issues are often common and similar among diverse applications. This thesis presents the Ubiquitous Integration and Temporal Synchronisation (UbiITS) framework, a generic solution to address the technical complexities in building DCISs. The proposed solution is an abstract software framework that can be extended and customised to any application requirements. UbiITS includes all fundamental software components, techniques, system level layer abstractions and reference architecture as a collection to enable the systematic construction of complex DCISs. This work details four case studies to showcase the versatility and extensibility of UbiITS framework’s functionalities and demonstrate how it was employed to successfully solve a range of technical requirements. In each case UbiITS operated as the core element of each application. Additionally, these case studies are novel systems by themselves in each of their domains. Longstanding technical issues such as flexibly integrating and interoperating multimodal tools, precise time synchronisation, etc., were resolved in each application by employing UbiITS. The framework enabled establishing a functional system infrastructure in these cases, essentially opening up new lines of research in each discipline where these research approaches would not have been possible without the infrastructure provided by the framework. The thesis further presents a sample implementation of the framework on a device firmware exhibiting its capability to be directly implemented on a hardware platform. Summary metrics are also produced to establish the complexity, reusability, extendibility, implementation and maintainability characteristics of the framework.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grants - EP/F02553X/1, 114433 and 11394

Bit Bang 7: Future of Energy

This book is the 7th in the Bit Bang series of books produced as multidisciplinary teamwork exercises by doctoral students participating in the course Bit Bang 7: Future of Energy at Aalto University during the academic year 2014–2015. The course aims at fostering teamwork and multidisciplinary collaboration, as well as providing participants with a global, futurecentric perspective on the energy sector. The growing global demand for energy and diminishing natural resources are driving the development of eco-efficient energy sources, new ways of doing business, and designing our living environment. Bit Bang 7 addresses the topic of energy sources and technologies from the perspective of their economic, environmental and social sustainability. The course elaborates on the interconnectedness of these phenomena, and links them to possible future scenarios, global megatrends and ethical considerations. Will we see disruptive changes in our energy future? Can we impact consumption patterns, ways of doing business, and our way of life? Are we creating a sustainable future for the generations to come? Working in teams, the students set out to answer questions related to the changing energy sector and to brainstorm radical scenarios of what the future could hold. This joint publication contains articles produced as teamwork assignments for the course, in which the students were encouraged to take novel and radical views on the future of energy. The Bit Bang series of courses is supported by the Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy (MIDE). Previous Bit Bang publications are available from http:/mide.aalto.fi